Complex Numbers

Quack!

The more I read, the more I think people is mostly dumb.

Case in point:

http://observers.france24.com/en/content/20090413-plight-africa-albinos-cameroon...

"I left my country to escape the widespread prejudice targeting albinos such as me. People are starting to talk more and more about the plight of albinos in Tanzania, but things are much the same in Cameroon. Different parts of our bodies are sought for their supposed miraculous powers: to become rich, win elections or concoct love potions.

In south-west Cameroon, where I studied, there is an old belief that when the local volcano erupts, only albino blood can placate the god of the mountain..."

Seriously, wtf? I've heard that there's a widespread rumor in some African countries that the way to cure AIDS is to have sex with a virgin, and since you never can tell who's a virgin they look for younger and younger "cures" - with the predictable (to us) result that AIDS becomes more widespread. To be fair, I have no idea if this is true or just rumormongering, but the fact that it's believable to me means that either a) I'm terribly prejudiced or b) Africa is so frakked up that it makes Japan look normal. I'm inclined to b) because of things like the albino story above.

"Oh, so what we need is more education!" I hear that a lot. "Education will end superstition!"

Well, actually, no. Education doesn't seem to make a dent in deep-rooted superstition. It wasn't that long ago that folks of Western European descent were burning witches, and we still turn to quackery when things get tough, despite scientific evidence. Here:

http://www.newscientist.com//article/dn17064-quack-remedies-spread-by-virtue-of-...

Eating a vulture won't clear a bad case of syphilis nor will a drink made of rotting snakes treat leprosy, but these and other bogus medical treatments spread precisely because they don't work. That's the counterintuitive finding of a mathematical model of medical quackery.

Ineffective treatments don't cure an illness, so sufferers demonstrate them to more people than those who recovery quickly after taking real medicines...

Okay, so it's not nearly as bad as cutting parts off of albinos to bring good luck (to the cutter, presumably, not the albino), but it's still quackery.

Nor am I immune. When my back was in persistent, unrelenting agony last year, I tried everything I could, including so-called "holistic" remedies. And hell, for all I know, they worked, because when the pain finally stopped, I couldn't point to any one cause for it to stop - though I'd tried standard medical treatments along with physical therapy, massage, herbal pills, and electrostimulation.

(If I had to guess, I'd venture that it was the electrostimulation - but I have no idea. At the very least, it didn't seem to cause harm)

Point is, I'm an educated guy, especially by world standards, and I was still willing to try, well, just about anything to make the pain go away (though I like to thing I'd stop short of harvesting albino parts, it's probably good that I don't have ready access to albinos). I can only imagine what people who have life-threatening or terminal illnesses are willing to do, with or without the benefit of science and education.

But why? Well, I'm not sold on the effectiveness of "scientific" treatments in many cases. From the second article linked above:

And in some cases, one peer-reviewed study may conclude that a drug works, while another shows it doesn't. "Even where there is a bit of clinical research, we don't really know yet whether at lot of medicines are effective..."

And what about prescriptions that turn out to be worse than the disease they're supposed to cure? How are we supposed to know? Hell, even putting aside medications, we can't even get it straight as a culture whether certain foods are good for you, bad for you, or neutral. Chicken eggs, for instance: during my lifetime, they've been nutritious, deadly, okay, harmful, helpful and now I think they're back to being nutritious, but I stopped giving a shit long ago and just enjoyed the occasional omelet.

Or how about aspartame, that artificial sweetener that's in bloody everything these days? No one seems to argue that it's beneficial in and of itself, but some say it's good in that it allows people to satisfy a craving for sweets without the attendant calories that can lead to obesity and complications thereof. Others assert that it's harmful in the long run because it doesn't really satisfy the craving for sweets, encouraging people to eat more to compensate. Me, I don't know; I just know I hate "high fructose corn syrup," which is what they put in Coke these days instead of sugar, so I drink Coke Zero instead. For whatever it's worth, the FDA considers aspartame safe.

But there was an email circulating a while back that blamed it for cancer, AIDS, spontaneous human combustion, and the takeover of the Republican party by religious fanatics (okay, maybe not anything quite as bad as the last item, but you get the idea):

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blasp.htm

...I explained that I was there to lecture on exactly that subject. When the temperature of Aspartame exceeds 86 degrees F, the wood alcohol in ASPARTAME coverts to formaldehyde and then to formic acid, which in turn causes metabolic acidosis. (Formic acid is the poison found in the sting of fire ants). The methanol toxicity mimics multiple sclerosis; thus people were being diagnosed with having multiple sclerosis in error. The multiple sclerosis is not a death sentence, where methanol toxicity is... (this text is quoted from the circulating email, which is widely accepted as false).

From page 2: Martini's answer, as I mentioned above, is pat and comes in the form of a conspiracy theory: the NutraSweet Company has used its deep pockets to buy all but a very few critics off. I.e., the only sources you can trust, including doctors and scientists, are those approved by Martini.

You know, if you have an assertion to make, you're not helping your credibility to proclaim that everyone who disagrees with you is part of a vast, overarching conspiracy. Then again, maybe the author has simply consumed too much Splenda. Point being, if we don't have pre-existing superstitions about something, we seem to have to make them up.

So who can we trust, when it comes to deciding what to put into our bodies or not?

No one, of course.

But science is still better than superstition. Unless, of course, science is actually a giant conspiracy that will not rest until we are destroyed.